Men's Right to Choose?

Angelica at Battlepanda has an interesting post on the argument raised by some advocates of “Men’s Rights” that men ought to be able to state a preference for abortion and thereby avoid any child support obligation if the woman chooses to carry the pregnancy to term anyway http://battlepanda.blogspot.com/2006/03/lindsay-beyerstein-is-brilliant.html .

In my view, while there is some similarity between the right of a woman to control her own body (this involves personal sovereignty) and the imposition of support obligations (this involves property, an aspect of personal sovereignty), the two issues are about two distinct rights and two distinct exercises of power by the state.

In a perfect world, support would be a matter decided by contract between the parents. Neither parent has a “right” to the property of the other absent an agreement, and a child has no “right” to the property of its parents or to any other person. Of course, we don’t live in such a world; rather, we live in a world where the state exercises power over everyone’s bodies and property with few theoretical limits. Our “rights” are of almost no consequence to the state when it deliberates how it will rule over us.

The perfect world I have described would doubtless be troubled by instances of parents who declined to support their children, but I reckon that there would be plenty of volunteers and charitable folks who would intervene and that coercion would not be necessary to solve this problem. The state wants us to believe that it has the solution to this problem: force.

Child support laws are ostensibly designed to provide for the maintenance of children, whether wanted or unwanted, and some states have apparently decided that it is easier to put the burden on the parties most intimately involved with the child rather than on society as a whole. The state could, and does, tax everyone and provide support for children in need and who have inadequate support from parents or volunteers. Perhaps our rulers consider that socializing care for children with parents who are financially capable of supporting them would meet with more public resistance than the exercise of such power would be worth.

The state concerns itself with the support of children in the first place as part of maintaining the illusion that the state exists to serve its subjects. If it did not provide for its most vulnerable subjects, this would be highly visible to the proletariat and raise questions about the propriety or necessity of all the other things the state undertakes. The basic premise of the total state might be undermined and become problematic to the herd. At the same time, every dollar the state spends on ordinary people, such as poor children, is one dollar less for the programs that enrich our rulers.

I would not find a child support scheme that allowed men to opt out before birth any more objectionable than the existing scheme. The upside would be that it would require a recognition that people have a choice about parenting. The downside would be that more children would probably be supported by taxpayers. Other effects might be a change in the number of children born out of wedlock since the cost-benefit calculus would be changed with a concomitant change in the number of abortions.